Siteground is the best shared hosting for Joomla. Secure, very fast and excellent support. If you really want to save money and use them to become a reseller and you can get the bottom tier for the lowest price forever. Otherwise, sign up for 3 years at the discount rate.

Ganny thank you for great post about your experience with these 2 companies. I was long ago user of SiteGround but wanted to test Gator too. did anyone tested A2?

I am using A2 at the moment, so far, so good. But time, and problems, or lack of, are the real proof. I also have an account at Arvixe. I tend to use A2 for anything new as they have free https. That's the main reason for moving away from Arvixe as they only offer paid for https, and that gets expensive with multiple sites. Another good feature for A2 is that they have a perpetual scan for vulnerabilities and as soon as a patch is available for your CMS they tell you and apply it, if you don't.

When I shopped for A2 I also considered Siteground, but, to me, they did not represent as good as value for money as A2.

Siteground has the same SSL service and it's free. They also will auto-update WordPress or Joomla. They both look somewhat similar but Siteground has stellar reviews and doesn't seem much different price-wise.

A2 looks interesting but I did not look into it. I researched Siteground extensively and have been using them for a few years and they are all they say they are. They also monitor the usage of the accounts very closely so no single account hogs or ruins the node for all the accounts. A common issue with cheap shared hosting. They also isolate the accounts with proprietary methods to prevent the server hacking issues like places like Blodaddy is plagued with.

Lastly, saying there is unlimited this and that is a lie. It's common practice to say this on shared hosting but it's not true. They certainly have a limit. I did not see any information A2's Email system but imagine the offer email. Another thing Siteground does is layout every detail so you know what you get. How many emails per hour that can be sent, storage limits per email account, etc. Very transparent.

I'm using A2 Hosting for a couple of sites, and they are pretty darn good. What I don't like in Hostgator is when your site is infected, they tell you. But not where or what. That's $25 extra. Fixing it is another $$$ extra. A2 Hosting is the same in price, but not only do they tell you where and what is infected, they also clean it. Free of charge.

Lastly, saying there is unlimited this and that is a lie. It's common practice to say this on shared hosting but it's not true. They certainly have a limit. I did not see any information A2's Email system but imagine the offer email. Another thing Siteground does is layout every detail so you know what you get. How many emails per hour that can be sent, storage limits per email account, etc. Very transparent.

This is a very valid point to consider. I am not sure what Siteground offer, but A2 has unlimited most things, including disc space. The aspect I always ask about is the 'node' allowance. Because, although you maybe able to host 100 websites on an 'unlimited' package, if the node allowance is on 50k it's not gonna be suitable. A2 give me 600,000 nodes on my unlimited package. Which should be more than enough for what I need.

I just had a look at siteground and their services are quite limited when compared to A2. The biggest disk space, offered is on their GoGeek option and it is only allocated 450,000 nodes.

Arvixe, on the other hand do not cap their nodes at all, or their disc size. And as far as I can see, there is an infinity symbol by every item in my cpanel for the specs of the hosting account I have. The only downside to Arvixe other than the https thing is that they were bought out by EIG a couple of years ago and from that instant, their customer service went down the pan.

I suppose there are other things to consider like customer service etc and how they deal with problems. These are often overlooked, especially if you are lucky enough to not need their help when problems arise.
I like the idea of added security and auto upgrades etc. I was unfortunatly hacked a couple of years ago, on Arvixe. They were no help at all, other than suspending my account until I got it sorted out. As the hack was so bad and there were so many infected files, I had to start from scratch and install backups I had luckily taken before the hack was noticed.

This is a very old thread but it seems to be live in 2019 so I am replying.

To me the best Joomla Hosting is the one that is cheap. for example, GoDaddy has economy hosting for £14.00 per year and they also throw in a free domain in the first year. They have Linux as well as Windows hosting for the same price. this is not easy to find on their website because it is hidden so I've copied the links and kept for future reference. This is only for one site so if you have many clients you are handling then you need Monster, CloudAccess, SiteGround, HosGator etc who gives you unlimited websites.

Of course, this all depends on how computer savvy you are and how astute you are when they phone you to sell some other services. I.ve not had any problems with them and I know how to handle cold-calling by their sales staff.

I use cloudaccess, found through this website, i'm guessing they're set up for J!. Stuff changed around about a year or so ago with the trial hosting. What i like about them is now they'll let you develop your website without a bunch of ads breaking up the content (unlike wordpress) and then you can upgrade to paid hosting when you're ready. Have had no problems and the support is pretty good.

Avoid EIG at all costs. I've had terrible experience with them. I heard good things about Siteground but never used it. I'm using Digitalocean and it's great considering that I can increase resources on weekends.

I recently moved some sites because the host was purchased by GoDaddy.
At first, there was only a slight deterioration in service but very quickly it dive bombed.
My readers left in droves, so I had to bite the bullet and leave the contract some ten months early.

I would not recommend them.

"Experts often possess more data than judgement."All suggestions are given with good intent.http://arbitrarytimes.com Where I test stuff....

They're not hosted, so you'd have to set the servers up yourself, but I'd always recommend either Digital Ocean or Amazon Web Services. Both are very bullet proof and will scale nicely to huge websites.

Not the answer for most people in this forum, but dead honest, I would rather run my own servers or pay someone to run a server than go to a shared hosting platform with a Joomla website in 2020. In general, I've had enough frustrations with the different hosting providers I've dealt with over the years, and found enough pain points in the WHM/cPanel configuration that I can deal with straight up server configuration on my own more efficiently now.

Plus, way too many shared hosting providers are going to a WordPress optimized or WordPress only solution. Which worries me about trying to run more complicated PHP applications on those servers. I don't see a lot of these companies doing a lot to support non-WordPress applications, and I worry they are going to upsell the crap out of getting people onto WordPress as it's going to be better for their business. I've already moved one of my straight up PHP applications off a shared hosting platform to my own server based on that concern (not to mention the major cost savings).